Poet Ponders the Digital

Visalia Direct: Virtual Valley October 8, 2012 Deadline November 2012 Issue RSS Feeds: The Best Way to (not) Surf the Web Surfing the World Wide Web on a daily quest for the latest news is inefficient and frustrating. I read stories from at least a dozen technology sites and the experience can be annoying. From too many advertisements to videos that start automatically, I don’t like the websites. Why go from site to site when you can have latest news gathered conveniently in one place? No, I’m not suggesting you follow every news site on Google+ or Facebook. My Facebook feed is too cluttered to be useful for serious research and nobody I know uses Google+ on regular basis. There is a better solution for news junkies, though. The best way to read headlines is to use RSS feeds. With RSS, you can have the latest stories from your favorite news sources collected and organized in one location. I can open my RSS application and the latest headlines from more than 100 sources are ...

WETAKEYOURCLASS.COM-  We Take Your Online Class! We Do Your Homework, Tests, Classes For You! What needs to be written about the above link and dozens more like it? Online and distance education are at least slightly more prone to cheating, and I wonder if they are not significantly more prone to dishonestly than their traditional and hybrid counterparts. Students have been able to purchase papers for as long as instructors have assigned papers. We all know that friends "help" each other, and sometimes even parents help compose a paper. Yet, buying a paper reveals a complete misunderstanding of the purpose of an education. Now, we have to deal with students buying class attendance. Forget cheating on tests or buying papers, students aren't even attending the online lectures. Cheating is bad enough, but at least if you were in a classroom there was a chance (maybe only a slight chance) that you would learn something. You might hear one new idea, one inspiring comm...

A few years ago, a colleague and I at the University of Minnesota helped our students launch a Wikibook project on professional and technical writing. The link to the project is: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Professional_and_Technical_Writing I am posting this to two blogs, one on rhetoric and one on digital pedagogy, with the hope that someone out there has a class that could reboot this project and bring it back to life. I had only four students in my technical writing course this spring, at a small private university, and they edited a few pages. However, the project needs to be much larger than four students every other year if it is going to thrive. My view is that students in a variety of courses could update and expand the project. The book needs material on ethics, communication theory, visual design, style guides, and more. I'm sure there are dozens of topics that could be tackled by students. Please, consider asking your students to contribute to this project. ...

Which documentation standards do we decide what to teach students, and does it matter? In this post, I'm going to explain why I teach students in my technical writing courses XHTML for Web design instead of HTML5. My suggestion is to teach what works most consistently across computing platforms, knowing that the standards of today will be replaced. Documentation file formats and coding habits should adhere to standards because one of the goals of technical documentation is that it be easy to update and revise at a later date. Teaching documentation, therefore, should include teaching the ideal habits for technical writers and documentation designers. Consider HTML and XHTML. Long before standards bodies, such as the W3C, approve and finalize any standard, experience teaches us that the browser developers will have already implemented a mix of whatever is coming — and each browser will be an incomplete and incompatible mess. I still remember trying to get basic features to ...

Visalia Direct: Virtual Valley September 3, 2012 Deadline October 2012 Issue Internet Radio: Something for Everyone Radio has changed dramatically since I first wrote about Internet radio five years ago. Way back in 2007, you needed a computer with a broadband Internet connection to listen to streaming audio. Today, I listen to live BBC broadcasts on my iPhone while taking walks. You can stream audio from the Internet through car radios, televisions, stereo systems, and even an “Internet-ready” refrigerator is sold with a streaming audio app. Most Blu-ray players and high-end home audio receivers include Internet radio features, often via the Pandora streaming audio service. Streaming audio has been available on the Internet since the mid-1990s. RealNetworks launched in 1995, with the RealPlayer featuring a few dozen audio streams. Despite pioneering streaming audio and video-on-demand services, RealNetworks was unable to establish itself as the leading Internet radio prov...

This column offers solutions with which I disagree, but it is thought-provoking. The Fiscal Cliff for Higher Education - Next - The Chronicle of Higher Education : Moody’s notes that the number of students accepting admissions offers from colleges that the agency rates has been dropping at a fast clip since 2008. That comes even as those institutions are spending more to enroll those students. The trend, Moody’s said, is particularly serious at the lower-rated private colleges, “which are increasingly competing with lower-cost public colleges and feeling the most pressure to slow tuition increases and offer more tuition discounting.” What bothers me is that online education is viewed as the savior of struggling campuses, not for pedagogical reasons but because online courses can generate revenue. Southern New Hampshire could easily have been one of the many struggling small private colleges in the Northeast, but... it has transformed itself into a test-bed for ideas on the future ...

I agree with this, and hope we eventually realize that technology-driven education (often how online is marketed) is a mistake. Technology should support pedagogy, not drive it. And, no matter what some universities claim, they are letting the technology lead, especially because they view online education as a revenue stream. Technology Has Its Place: Behind a Caring Teacher - Commentary - The Chronicle of Higher Education : After millennia of experimentation, we know a great deal about how people learn. We know that the best learning involves practices—lots of them. We know that effective learning is best achieved through the engagement of other deeply attentive human beings. The learning might occur in a traditional classroom, but it might happen in a different space: a lab, a mountain stream, an international campus, a cafeteria, a residence hall, a basketball court.  No PowerPoint presentation or elegant online lecture can make up for the surprise, the frisson, the spontane...